Is it better
to cup the burning,
to wake each morning already ash-tongued,
waiting for the hour your body
dimly constellates itself into ruin,
a graveyard flickering with small, exhausted suns,
or is it better
to carry nothing,
hands rinsed clean of wanting?
I have wanted to etch something into the world
only to watch it leave me.
To love a thing so near
it learns the language of distance.
Tell me,
do pinecones ache in their branches,
dreaming of the ground they cannot yet touch?
Do they call the tight clasp of wood
safety,
or do they feel the shape of a cage forming
around their quiet insistence to fall?
I have built my own enclosure carefully,
fingertip by fingertip,
threaded grief through wire,
dragged my softness across its teeth
and called the breaking
a kind of living.
Look at me,
how I cling,
how I spill open,
how I make a ritual of ache,
listening at the small hollow of your collarbone
for the things you press down into silence.
You call them monstrous.
Still, they lull me,
low and trembling,
into sleep.
So I climb,
into the high, uncertain arms of trees,
where the air thins into something almost holy,
and I shake the branches,
again, again,
until something loosens.
Until I can believe
my touch is not a prison.
That it can be permission.
You asked me
why I hold you
like something already leaving.
I told you,
pinecones are full of longing for gravity,
for the sudden mercy of descent,
for the brief, brutal kindness
of striking earth,
for becoming, at last,
the very thing
we spend our whole lives
Trying not to become